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The good news about overall crime dropping more than 50 percent in the last decade has been largely diluted by a spate of shootings and the killings in the last year of more than a dozen high school students who were caught in a numbing cycle of gratuitous bloodshed.

"If people don't feel safe on the streets, even if it's just a perception, then the private investment and job creation that's needed to bring about the city's revitalization cannot move forward," said Ken Zimmerman, executive director of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, an urban research and advocacy group based in Newark.

A Bleeding City, Seeking More Than a Band-Aid
By ANDREW JACOBS

NEWARK, May 18 — Kelvin Kelley, who was 16, was laid to rest on Monday, the gunshot wounds to his torso concealed by the crisp beige suit he had recently worn to a high school speech team competition at Harvard University. The following day, mourners said goodbye to his best friend, Hassan Ferguson, 16, who was killed alongside Kelvin in a Central Ward parking lot on May 9.

It was the same day that Newark elected Cory Booker as the city's first new mayor in two decades.

These two killings and another shooting on Wednesday brought the number of murders in 2006 to 40, 11 more than during the same period last year. Nearly half of those killed were under 21.

Hopes for a safer, saner city are squarely focused on Mr. Booker, a suburban-raised Rhodes scholar and former Newark council member who has promised to bring law and order to a city awash in illegal guns, gang violence and fear. A big part of his plan hinges on overhauling the city's troubled Police Department.

"Everything falls on my shoulders now," he said after attending Kelvin's funeral. "The challenge is to switch from talking about solutions to implementing solutions."

Public safety, most everyone here agrees, is the issue that could make or break the mayoralty of Mr. Booker, a 37-year-old Democrat who is often mentioned as a national up-and-comer. He is to take office on July 1.

In Mr. Booker's own polls taken during the campaign, more than 80 percent of residents cited crime as the No. 1 issue, far outstripping concerns over the city's beleaguered school system, a lack of decent jobs and a poverty rate that keeps Newark mired in the bottom tier of America's most battered municipalities.